What happens when you naively take your baby-child to a weird and wacky place called Madagascar in 1986?

Read all about it in my story Maddening Madagascar —

The prostitutes thought our son Galen was a real gentleman. In fact, maybe the only gentleman (besides his father) in the crowd dining al fresco in front of the Hotel du France in Antananarivo.

This was our first night in the capital of Madagascar after a flight from Nairobi. At the suggestion of a fellow traveler, we had added this stop to a safari trip in Kenya. It took a while for us to realize that the well-heeled, Levi-clad young girls milling around us in the restaurant were plying their trade. Packs of hungry-eyed children clustered behind the iron fence separating the patio from the sidewalk. The girls passed food and money to the youngsters—family members waiting to be fed. While the girls waited for men to consign their services, they bounced our blond, blue-eyed three-year-old on their knees. Cutest Westerner they’d ever seen.

That night, when we bedded down in our room, haunting sounds of creaking springs and frequent groans seeped through the walls. Sleep eluded us as deep male grunts confirmed our suspicions that this hotel was not on the Relais et Chateaux route.

At 6:00 a.m. the following morning, we shuffled off to the train station and set out to explore the mysteries of Madagascar in a 19^th century “iron horse.” Late in the day, we disembarked at Perinet, on the edge of a lemur preserve, and checked into a dilapidated hotel next to the train station.

One of the wonders that lured us to Madagascar was its prolific and unique flora and fauna. This red-earth island, 250 miles off the coast of East Africa, is the place to find grotesquely shaped Baobab trees, mysterious underwater coelacanths (fish once thought to be extinct), and mouse lemurs, the smallest primates in the world.

A guide led us into the rainforest looking for indri-indri, one of thirty-three lemur species found only in Madagascar. Treading for miles beneath the dense canopy, we craned our necks looking for this endangered and elusive lemur, which sleeps eighteen hours a day. Finally, several indri-indri stirred the canopy a hundred feet overhead, and we were treated to a brief glimpse of furry behinds.

The next morning, my intrepid husband felt the lure of the lemur and took off again with the guide into the yawning green. Galen and I chose to explore a local village. We found a town near the train tracks and were soon surrounded by a swarm of jaundiced children with bloated stomachs and brittle hair. Sewage trickled down the gullies beside the dirt track that wound through town. I held onto my son, who wanted to pass out the candy we had bought in Antananarivo. How do you divide twenty-five pieces of candy among hundreds of hungry children?

When my husband returned from his lemur search to the hotel, he was surprised to find me crying. It had broken my heart to see children in such a hopeless situation while my robust son, wrapped protectively in my arms, reached out to them, wanting to share his candy stash.

That night, we boarded a train for the ten-hour ride to Tamatave where we were going to catch a flight the next day. Rumors spread through the train that just the day before, Malagasy had rioted against Hindu residents, killing many and exiling hundreds and Tamatave was under martial law. To add to our discomfort, torrential sheets of rain pounded on the steamy windows. There was no food, water, electricity or ventilation. The windows were rusted shut. Only lightning bolts illuminated the train interior at night.

Desperate for a breath of fresh air, I disembarked at one stop by myself and stood in the pouring rain, refusing to get back on. The stress of Third World travel was getting to me. My husband grabbed my arm and yanked me onto the train as it began to move away from the platform.

In Tamatave, we stayed in another whorehouse. It seemed all the “decent” hotels were bordellos. We were beginning to wonder where the other tourists were. By the end of the two-week trip, we had encountered only a handful: two French expats from the nearby island of Reunion and three Russian scientists on leave from their expedition boat. After the French colonists left Madagascar in 1960, the country became Marxist, and closed its doors to Westerners. The doors were beginning to creak open again and it seemed we were among the first tourists allowed in.

As we left Tamatave, it was hard to ignore all the shop windows broken from the rioting the day before. We were flying from civilized madness to Île Sainte-Marie, a coconut-strewn haven cloaked in romantic history, the retirement spot for legendary pirates.

We boarded the small plane, thinking it was our escape to a real vacation. We headed into a tormented sky. The wind god played ping-pong with our aircraft. I crossed myself. I’m not Catholic, but it beat biting off my nails. Touch down we did, finally, right before I threw up. Nobody got off the plane but us, yet people were pushing to get on. We soon learned that a cyclone was coming.

Cyclones are disturbingly loud—like a very angry, roaring and snarling lion. And wet. And they last several days. We were stuck on the island for four days staring at the downpour with our ears plugged. Not a shred of blue sky. At night, we slept under the bed on the concrete floor, afraid the roof would blow off and carry our small son into the heavens. On a positive note, we were served an unlimited amount of lobster for lunch and dinner.

After the cyclone calmed down, we finally got to explore Île Sainte-Marie only to find that the entire island had been flooded and most places were inaccessible. The beautiful white sand beaches were completely covered in debris and fallen coconut palms.

Exhaustedly, we packed up our books, bikinis, and beach toys and off we flew to our next destination but things did not improve. One of our worst days involved a twelve-hour ride sitting on leaky gasoline cans in one hundred-degree heat, bouncing over a pot-holed dirt road. My husband suffered the most, his skin carpeted with an iodine rash from eating too much lobster.

The driver dropped us off in Ambanja in northern Madagascar, a port town with not a single motorized vehicle in sight. The streets were a swirl of livestock, saronged women, wary-eyed men, and throngs of children. It was too hot to be inside at night. Charcoal braziers smoked in front of huts. Our lodging was a bordello dive, but they had beer.

Beer was our savior. We sat on rickety chairs in the middle of the road, swigging Three Horses, the local brew, and watching Galen cavort with a baby goat. I felt happy, ecstatic even. Perhaps this remote pageant of humanity milling before us swathed in bright colors and dark skin glowing from the firelight, was worth the horrendous ride.

The beer not only went to my head, it went to my bladder. I walked giddily to the outhouse and entered the pitch dark. I heard a scurrying noise and turned on my flashlight. Two fat rats eyed my descend­ing bare bottom. I felt too sick to even scream.

The mosquitoes in Ambanja are chloroquine resistant and we couldn’t give Galen the other anti­malarial drug because it is too strong for children (and probably adults). If one of the several hundred constantly-hovering bugs bit Galen, he had a high probability of getting malaria. We were on mosquito (and rat) alert all night. Buzz, swat. Buzz, swat. Buzz, swat.

The next morning, we waited with others at an inlet for a boat to Hellville, on the island of Nosy Be, Madagascar’s only touristy beach resort. The town’s name made me uneasy. Why was it named after the Devil’s abode? It was the only English town name we had encountered. I wondered what the Malagasy names meant. Tamatave: town of broken glass. Ambanja: land of ass-biting rats?

A whitewashed steamer pulled up after the requisite half-day delay. The ocean was as smooth as glass. Dolphins broke the placid emerald surface. A Chinese family offered us sticky buns and tea. In Chinese-accented French, they told me how the sister boat of the one we were on had sunk a month before. They all turned and pointed. There she was, sticking her nose up out of the water.  “Everybody died,” they said and continued, “Too many passengers for old boat. Like today… too many.”

They seemed calm. Why should I worry? They weren’t. I counted heads and clenched my jaw with every tilt of the boat.

Finally, Nosy Be appeared on the horizon and we were still afloat. We docked in Hellville and checked into a Holiday Inn with clean towels, French cuisine, and movies at night. Ironically, the town with the most foreboding name turned out to be normal. I was bored. After all we’d seen and done, it just seemed so dull.

 Some days, during our challenging meander through Madagascar, I was on cruise control just so I wouldn’t go out of my mind. At those times, I’d write murder mysteries in my head, pray for a cold beer, clean my fingernails. We came to appreciate the simple pleasures only after we’d had our vacation illusions pounded out of us.

On our last night, a scraggly troupe of Chinese acrobats were in town and, for thirty cents, we watched them balance on top of twenty chairs and do pretzel-shaped contortions.

Would I go back? Yes, but I’d leave my son at home and expect the unexpected. Galen, if he could remember, would probably tell you a whole different story, one filled with odd wonders—bug wings the size of his hand, kid goats frolicking with him on the street, and plane rides reminiscent of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland. I’d have a hard time keeping him from coming along.

This story has been published in BATW Tastes of Travel  and Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman.